Sunday, February 1, 2015

#28daysofwriting Day one!

28 Days of Writing

Today is February the first and thanks to the wonderful innovation of Tom Barrett, today is the first day of, just that, 28 days of writing.  I thought I would spend the first day blogging about what I hope to get out of the challenge, and what I am looking forward to. 

I anticipate spending 28 minutes writing for each of the 28 days.  I am really keen for writing on my blog to become an integral part of my daily reflection. I am also keen to work on my writing craft.  Through the regular writing I am anticipating an improvement in the flow and rhythm of my writing.  I am going to challenge myself to write in differing styles and genres… maybe even attempt a poetic piece or a song, who knows.  So lets get some of these ‘goals’ committed in bullet form:

·      I will write for at least 28 minutes each day for my blog;
·      The main focus of my writing will be year beginnings and inquiry;
·      I will choose a variety of styles and genres;
·      I will invite connection and collaboration with my writings and wonderings;
·      I will share each post with a wider audience through tagging, on twitter, in the VPLD, the vln, and the Ethos community, some may even make it to the Facebook group NZ Teachers (Primary);
·      I will include reflections on my readings and my professional development;
·      I will encourage others to become involved in this journey;
·      I will connect with and comment on blogs of others in this initiative – aiming for two + comments per day;
·      I will have a lot of fun and share MAGIC wherever I can.
·       
Well, that looks a manageable task. I really will need to maximize opportunities for reflection and sharing my journey because the February calendar is full!

I am feeling quite confident with my inquiry for 2015, as I really do need to focus on my listening and questioning to ensure I provoke more questions than answers. 

As we work in a slightly different way this year, I really want to work on my mentoring skills.  Working face to face and virtually with e-leaders and principals from our clusters will afford an abundance of opportunity for mentoring.  

Hot on the tails of two days of professional learning and development at the Developing Virtual Mentor’s wananga, is a perfect time to reflect on what I really need to focus on.  

I think I really need to focus on being a mirror this year.  Reflecting on conversations, both face to face and online is a real area of focus.  Involving my mentees in my journey through feedback and feed forward, either face to face or in a survey, will be an integral part of my evidence gathering.  Just as in Austin’s butterfly, there was ample time for feedback along the way, to allow for refocuses, redirection, improvement; so I want to have time to act on feedback.  Our way of working in teams this year allows for feedback from colleagues as well as our clients.

Maybe I need to use Leigh’s way of working with Google forms to have feedback feed directly into a Google site?  Maybe this all needs to go to my Inquiry blog rather than my very public blog?  Maybe this needs to be shared with all our schools this year, as a way of modeling inquiry and evidence gathering?  Maybe it needs to be shared across our team so we can all benefit from the shared wisdom, feed forward and feedback.

As we work with our schools to support e-leaders we are going to use an in-depth goal setting framework.  Alongside this we are going to support educators across our schools to use a framework for their teaching as inquiry (T@I).  We are anticipating the sharing of these inquiries across schools, and across clusters.

How do you set goals in your workplace?
How do you record and share and interact with T@I across your schools or clusters?

I really look forward to hearing your stories, seeing your examples, frameworks and ways of sharing.

Very excited to be here on this MAGIC journey that is #28daysofwriting


(695 words – 23 paragraphs – 73 lines - _ views, _ comments)  maybe, just maybe, I’ll record some stats…

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